Monthly Review: July 2022
I was roaming around the streets of Indira Nagar and visiting places I’d never been to at the beginning of the month. I was in Bengaluru for a week to explore the city while working from a hostel.
I was with my colleague, Sravan, and we walked a couple of kilometres daily to eat at the popular places around Indira Nagar. The list includes waiting for the delicious Tomato rice and the tasty Dosa at The Rameshwaram Cafe, booking a table at Toit, tasting the fantastic cheesecakes at The Glen’s Bakehouse, and finally, meeting for a chai at 1 AM at Chai Days with two of my colleagues, Sravan and Yitzhak.
I created an Instagram reel with pictures of the food I ate during my stay in Bengaluru. Watch it here.
I was in Bengaluru because our company organised an offsite to Coorg (Virajpet) for three days starting July 2nd. Since I’ve been working remotely from my first job, I was excited to meet my colleagues again after the first offsite in Nov 2021. We started from Bengaluru, and it was a hell of a journey by bus to Coorg.
We talked, slept, sang songs (okay, I didn’t) throughout the bus journey to Coorg, and finally reached the isolated Club Mahindra in Virajpet while it was raining. Enjoyed there for two days with most of my colleagues, made friends with them, dived into the pool, danced to ‘Naatu Naatu,’ ‘Maari’ songs, and returned to Bengaluru on 4th July. While there weren’t many outdoor activities, we had fun chatting and playing games inside the halls during our stay in Coorg.
Until the end of the first week of July, I neither read any book nor watched any movie.
Web Series
I binge-watched Guilty Minds on Amazon Prime on the weekend. I was desperately looking to engage myself and found this interesting. The structure of this series is good. They tried taking up one case per episode and delved into it while the characters’ relationships rise and fall in parallel.
The writing is good, and I loved the actors: Varun, Shriya, Namrata, and Sugandha. Shreya’s character in this series is relatable, and she performed well ❤
Better Call Saul
This. Is. Incredible. Totally in awe of the writers and actors, Bob, Rhea, Tony Dalton, and Jonathan Banks. The episodes of part 2 of the finale are intriguing and make us emotional and relieved to know that they didn’t kill the queen. Fingers crossed for the remaining episodes in the finale.
Feeling sad for Howard. Howard in BCS = Gale in BB.
Cinema
I didn’t watch many movies this month. I didn’t visit the cinema hall to watch the movies and saw only three movies on OTT.
Sicario
One of my friends recommended this movie when I asked them to suggest an action thriller sometime 2–3 months back. Happened to watch it in July, finally. This movie is engaging enough that I watched it in a single stretch without taking a break. I liked the film.
Get Out
Interesting story: The same friend sent me a screenshot of Jordan Peele commenting on a social media post praising Jordan for making amazing horror movies. I didn’t know who Jordan Peele was until then. My friend then suggested that I watch GET OUT, the debut of Jordan Peele as a filmmaker.
I saw it, and it really blew my mind. Please watch it. This movie won the Best Screenplay Award at the Oscars.
I was re-watching the scenes after watching the whole movie for the first time, and man, this is the high standard of writing. Apparently, Peele aborted the writing 19 times and came back at it for the 20th time to finish the script. Such an awesome movie!
Ante Sundariniki
A clean and honest cinema by Vivek Athreya. Can’t appreciate him enough for his writing and dealing with the sensitive issues. Love you more, sir. I wrote a separate blog about this film. You can read it here:
Reading
During the return journey from Bengaluru to my place, a person was holding all books in his hand and was selling them for half rate. He had a big pile of books, including popular self-help books and a couple of business books. I purchased “Shoe Dog”, written by Nike’s founder, Phil Knight.
I’m reading it every day, and the book is quite an interesting read so far. It’s a filtered version of his journal during the company’s formative years. After many days, here’s the book that hooked me.
Screenplays
As I was awestruck with Get Out, I immediately searched for its screenplay. Downloaded it the next day, thinking about reading it. This is my first ever reading of a screenplay. Since I saw the movie, it didn’t take time to get accustomed to the screenplay format.
Finished reading it in two days, and at regular intervals, I appreciated Jordan for coming up with such brilliant writing. The script’s political nature while dealing with the core plot is commendable.
Soon after this, I asked for the screenplay of a short film called Black Coffee, and the filmmaker shared it with me. I read it in a single stretch and found how smooth a film can be if the screenplay is clear. This new habit of reading screenplays is a good experience.
After knowing that he, with Key, made a series of comedy sketches on YouTube, I started binge-watching their sketches. Massive respect for this artist.
Other stuff
I stumbled upon this interaction between Kamal Haasan and Tamil writer Jeyamohan on literature and cinema. An insightful conversation.
Since I’ve been in the hostel for almost half of my life, I have learned many life skills except cooking and driving a car. I had many unfruitful attempts at learning both; this time, I just went with the flow.
I made sambar after learning it from my family, which was good! Surprisingly it was good in the second attempt. This fear of getting started stopped me from stepping inside the kitchen all these years. Now, I’m confident that I can learn many recipes :)
Coming to car driving, I learned how to drive a car when I was 18, but it was only to get a license. Now, I resumed learning again, with some experience and a good amount of confidence. There’s not much theory in many life skills. We just have to learn by practice, similar to my professional role, Product Management :D
Also, I wrote two blogs this month. This makes it three, and wish I get to write more frequently. A blog on Vikram is here:
July has been satisfactory for me since I met my people, read books and screenplays, visited places, started learning how to cook and how to drive, and saw a couple of movies. Wish I build on these, and the upcoming months are as good as July!
